The present invention relates generally to voice speech recognition, and more particularly, but not exclusively, to the retrieval of records from a directory using spoken characters.
Certain modern data retrieval systems use voice speech recognition technology to select a desired record from among many. These systems, however, fail to perform adequately in certain circumstances, such as in the recognition of certain characters that sound similar when spoken. Such failures severely limit the utility of these systems for many operators and in many applications.
Other systems fail to correctly retrieve records when one or more characters are missing or incorrectly interpreted. Again, such systems are of limited utility in many applications and for many operators.
It is, therefore, apparent that a need exists for improved systems that apply voice speech recognition technology to large-directory look-up situations.
It is an object of this invention to provide an improved system for retrieving records from a directory using spoken characters as input.
It is another object of this invention to provide an improved table look-up system for contexts in which operators speech patterns are inconsistent, or the prefix letters that are read by the operator are not clearly legible.
These objects and others are provided in a system, method, and apparatus that retrieve data from a directory based on the spoken initial characters of one or more fields. Substitution groups are established, each containing characters that sound alike when spoken. For each query, an operator speaks the first few characters of the one or more fields. The characters are parsed and decoded from the speech, thereby producing a set of candidate decodings for each character position. Then, for at least one character position, one or more alternative characters (from the same substitution group(s) as the candidate character(s) for that character position) are selected to broaden the search. In some such embodiments, a regular expression is created that, for each character position output by the voice engine, matches (1) any of the candidate characters presented by the voice engine, or (2) any alternative character that is in a substitution group within one or more of the decoded characters. The regular expression is processed by an inexact string matching look-up routine and applied to the directory. The best matches are presented to the operator, who selects the desired record.
Other embodiments, forms, variations, objects, features, and applications may appear to those skilled in the art from the drawings and description contained herein.